More than a third of the average internet user’s time spent online can be attributed to social media. As this digital landscape becomes an increasingly integral part of society, it’s no wonder so many businesses are pivoting their strategies to focus on social selling.
For your sales team, social selling offers the opportunity to make real connections and build trust with potential buyers, amplify your brand, accelerate your sales potential, and ultimately boost your bottom line.
What Is Social Selling?
Social selling is a sales strategy centered around connecting with buyers through social media. This type of selling has grown substantially in recent years due to the rise of ecommerce and social media prevalence.
Through social media, your sales team can build connections with potential leads, drive buyer engagement, and distribute sales content to move buyers through your funnel.
The Benefits of Social Selling
In an increasingly digital world, traditional sales methods alone are no longer enough to engage today’s buyers. Social selling has emerged as a powerful strategy that allows your sales team to connect with prospects where they spend much of their time—on social media.
By harnessing the power of social platforms, your sales team can nurture personal relationships and meet customer expectations in a more dynamic and effective way. The benefits of social selling include:
- Increasing sales opportunities: Social selling enables your team to identify and connect with potential buyers who may not have been reachable through traditional sales methods. By leveraging social media platforms, your sales team can engage with prospects in real time, join relevant conversations, and share valuable content that speaks to the needs and interests of your target audience and meets them where they are.
- Improving brand awareness and perception: Your team is your brand ambassador when they engage in social selling. Through their outreach, your team can increase the overall reach of your brand and improve public perception by engaging in meaningful, positive interactions with potential buyers.
- Staying competitive: As more and more brands prioritize social selling, your digital presence becomes increasingly important to your brand’s success. Employing an effective social selling strategy allows your team to remain relevant in today’s marketplace and outpace competitors online.
- Building trust with buyers: Social media is a tool to interact with buyers on a personal level. Your sales team can use social selling to create genuine relationships with potential buyers, connecting over personal achievements and shared content. By building this human connection beforehand, your team will be better set up for success when it comes time to make a sale.
Choosing Your Social Selling Channels
Ultimately, the social channels you use to sell your products will depend on your target audience’s online behavior. This makes preliminary research essential to a successful social selling strategy.
Regardless, you’ll likely use some combination of the top four social media platforms:
- X, formerly known as Twitter
Your team should use each platform for distinct purposes. For example, LinkedIn may be best for building B2B relationships. In fact, 62% of B2B marketers have found LinkedIn to be twice as effective at generating leads compared to the next best social platform.
Employing unique strategies for each platform can help diversify your tactics and leverage the top benefits of each to their maximum potential.
Considering the LinkedIn Social Selling Index
The Social Selling Index (SSI) is a measurement used by LinkedIn that was first introduced in 2014 to measure how effectively brands were engaging in social selling.
This index measures four key elements daily to calculate your brand’s social selling efforts:
- How well you’re establishing a professional brand with your LinkedIn profile
- If you’re reaching the right people on the platform
- If you’re sharing relevant, insightful content
- If you’re building relationships with positive interactions
If you plan on using LinkedIn for social selling, keeping an eye on your SSI can help improve your results, as social selling leaders with a higher SSI create 45% more opportunities than those with a lower score.
Social Selling Best Practices
Entering the world of social selling unprepared can be damaging to your credibility and brand. This sales strategy has a high degree of visibility and involves building trust at a personal level, so it’s crucial to keep best practices in mind.
1. Perform buyer research
Before you start building a social selling strategy, you need to find out where your buyers are scrolling. Using tactics like surveys and focus groups, your team can gather information about the platforms buyers use, what they use them for, and how they interact with other brands on those platforms.
This information will set the foundation of your social selling strategy and guide your team through their sales process. It can also be essential to identifying key buyer demographics, personas, and target audiences.
2. Make meaningful connections
Buyers appreciate the opportunity to connect with brands they’re interested in on a personal level. Encouraging your team to engage with buyers using their personal LinkedIn accounts to respond to comments, make connections, and build rapport through messages will enhance the trust and credibility of your brand, allowing your salespeople to more easily close potential buyers.
When your team interacts with customers, make sure they avoid cookie-cutter responses. Having salespeople connect with prospects with their natural voice results in a higher likelihood of a future relationship. And forging meaningful connections doesn’t mean your team must respond to every interaction or inquiry; on the contrary, having your team respond to each customer message or comment would likely lead to superficial exchanges and seem disingenuous. Instead, focus on encouraging them to engage in a way that offers value to both you and your prospects.
3. Engage in social listening
One of the key benefits of social selling is it allows your team to collect first-hand feedback about your brand. Whether it be a scathing review or a glowing product recommendation, your team can use social media to turn customer feedback into actionable results.
To ensure you’re catching every important mention, your social selling strategy should include the use of social listening tools such as:
- Google Alerts
- Search operators
- Hashtags
- Advanced search
- Third-party tools
Using these solutions correctly will help you effectively capture outbound feedback so you can stay ahead of issues, leverage promotions, and interact with your buyers.
4. Prioritize consistency
When your team engages on social, it’s easy to let their individual personalities leak into your messaging. And while it’s important to encourage your salespeople to play to their strengths when adding their own flair to buyer engagements, it’s equally important that they align with your internal guidelines. Make sure to arm your sales team, as well as your channel partners, with the resources they need to create a consistent experience.
It’s also important that you remain consistent with your volume of social posts and messages. It will take time to see the impact from social selling, so don’t abandon your strategy if you don’t see immediate results. The key to social selling is building trust on social platforms. As you consistently reach out and build relationships, you should see your results accelerate.
5. Share content that offers value
Your sales team members don’t need to become social media influencers. Yes, they can capture prospects’ attention by staying ahead of industry and social trends, but they shouldn’t chase relevance at the expense of providing valuable evergreen content. Create and share high-value pieces like thought leadership or educational content that enhance your brand’s credibility and establish your team as leaders in the space.
6. Track engagement metrics
Just like with any sales strategy, it’s important to keep your eye on the numbers. Measuring engagement, and the resulting outcomes, will help you improve your strategy, pinpoint shortcomings, and identify high-performing team members. Whether it be the SSI or other platform metrics, be sure to set up realistic goals and track against them over time.
Discover Top Sales Trends With Consensus
Social selling has become a vital part of the sales landscape, but this trend is just one of many that businesses are using to accelerate sales. Find out how you can leverage today’s sales trends to your advantage by reading our blog and gaining insights from industry experts.
